Trans-Pacific partnership supporters pin hopes on lame-duck vote

By Jackie Calmes, New York Times

June 1, 2016

Photo: DOUG MILLS, STF

President Barack Obama and Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang hold a news conference in Hanoi last week. Supporters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership hope Congress will approve the disputed trade deal after Election Day. ﻿

President Barack Obama and Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang hold...

WASHINGTON - The same harsh politics that have spawned obituaries for President Barack Obama's signature trade agreement between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations could actually help win its ratification in Congress in a lame-duck vote late this year, advocates are hoping.

The cause of free and open trade has not faced such political toxicity in decades, with Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders all openly hostile to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the largest regional trade accord in history. But supporters' seemingly perverse calculation is this: The certainty that Obama's successor would abandon the agreement gives new impetus for advocates to begin maneuvering toward a vote before 2017.

That dynamic, along with recent behind-the-scene developments assuaging some fence-sitters' concerns - on Japanese pork subsidies, Mexican labor rights and financial companies' data, notably - is keeping hope alive for advocates from the White House to the Republican-controlled Congress, and in pro-trade business and agriculture groups.

"Right now you have a president, a majority leader and a speaker who are all pro-trade," Obama's trade ambassador, Michael Froman, said in an interview, reflecting a seize-the-moment recognition of the changed lineup ahead.

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He is not alone in that reckoning, although many people in both parties declined to be quoted by name given the tenuous politics of the issue.

Whether that is wishful thinking or a real prospect will have to come into focus well before November because supporters would likely need to begin congressional hearings in September to clear the path for a vote in the lame-duck session of Congress after Election Day. Besides a new president, the Senate could have a new majority leader next year, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, if Democrats win control, and he is unlikely to promote an issue that so divides the union-friendly party.

And the forces do seem aligned against the pact's approval.

Months ago, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader who is pro-trade but worried about keeping Republican seats, ruled out a vote before the election. The so-called TPP would phase out thousands of tariffs, open up markets and impose new trade rules, including for labor rights and environmental standards, on signatory nations that span both sides of the Pacific - including Japan, Vietnam, Australia, Canada, Chile and Mexico.

The hostility toward trade agreements has built over decades as manufacturing jobs shifted overseas and middle-income wages stagnated.

Those politics have only grown more toxic, stoked by anti-trade blasts from Trump and Sanders in his challenge to the Democrats' front-runner, Clinton. Pressured by Sanders, Clinton turned on the agreement she had praised as the "gold standard" during negotiations.